Creating a Brand

Creating a branded look for the Chemeketa Community College’s new Threat Management Resources program in order to assist with marketing efforts.

Threat Management Resources is dedicated to the prevention of, reaction to, and recovery from targeted violence. They are committed to promoting best practices on threat management for communities.

Chemeketa’s Threat Management Resources program also provides consultation and training including Threat Assessment and Management, Active Shooter Response, Safety for Places of Worship, and Trauma Response.

These resources focus on violence prevention and recovery for any organization including schools, colleges, businesses, places of worship, and health-care facilities.

The first challenge in developing a brand for TMR was to create an image which communicated the global nature of the program without evoking police or military impressions (shields, targets, etc.). Rather, the message of the branding should be one of assurance and competence. It was also important to the program director that the connection with Chemeketa be obvious in all materials, so the logo had to work side by side with Chemeketa’s, and also to stay within Chemeketa’s brand identity guidelines.

I will often sketch with paper and pencil at this stage, but knew immediately that I wanted a globe so I started working on this directly in Illustrator. Once I had a globe I liked I tried it with several different logo types.

Ultimately the image chosen was the one with the representation of a horizon and a new beginning. Some gentle tweaking of the globe position and angle gave us the final image.

The next challenge was to create something to communicate the three different areas of focus in the TMR program. Three colors seemed to be the obvious solution and luckily Chemeketa’s secondary color pallet included colors which worked to create the red and blue versions of the globe.

Much of the collateral needed by the TMR program includes flyers and signage for promotion of the program at conferences. In addition, materials for conference attendees and class participants is needed. Due to the large volume of material from a variety of sources which is given to conference attendees it is important that materials that originate from TMR be readily identifiable. Putting together a letterhead type document has worked for much of that. A globe/map image features prominently in the background of these materials and works remarkably well at all sizes. In addition, the flyers are created with no bleed, so they can be printed on the office laser printer if necessary.

The final piece is a power point presentation for conference presenters. Several slide templates were created which can easily be customized by each presenter for each of the different areas of focus.

March 26, 2017

I’m updating here to add some additional materials created for the TMR program, including a modified logo. The Recovery logo was updated in response to requests from TMR to provide disaster recovery resources. The Disaster Behavioral Health Center now encompasses a variety of recovery programs for law enforcement, aid workers, and victims.